wheaties-brain-java

wheaties-brain-java combines PircBotX and JMegaHal into a simple conversational IRC bot.

The bot will respond when someone mentions its nick, and "learns" from all others. It attempts to identify "interesting" words in order to generate a relevant response, skipping common English words like articles and prepositions.

Each IRC channel gets its own "brain", so that conversations from one channel don't inadvertently leak into another.

wheaties-brain-java ignores messages that begin with any of the characters in IGNORE_PREFIXES (useful if you have other IRC bots whose interface involves a command prefix). It also ignores messages in the form "nick: x is y" to avoid conflicts with the Wheaties programmable chat bot.

If you're running Matterbridge, you might have an IRC bot in your channel that sends messages of the form "[source] <nick> message" or "<nick> message". wheaties-brain-java recognizes those, and only learns from the chat message itself.

Usage

The easiest way to run wheaties-brain-java is using the blolol/wheaties-brain-java Docker image:

docker run -e IRC_NICK=Wheaties -e IRC_SERVER=irc.example.com blolol/wheaties-brain-java:latest

wheaties-brain-java can be configured using the following environment variables.

Name	Required?	Description
IGNORE_PREFIXES	Optional	Ignore messages starting with any character in this environment variable's value.
IRC_CHANNELS	Required	Comma-separated list of IRC channels to join.
IRC_NICK	Required	IRC nickname.
IRC_PASS	Optional	IRC server password.
IRC_PORT	Required	IRC server port.
IRC_REALNAME	Required	IRC real name.
IRC_SASL	Optional	Set to true to authenticate using SASL using IRC_USER and IRC_PASS.
IRC_SERVER	Required	IRC server address.
IRC_TLS	Optional	Set to true to connect using TLS.
IRC_USER	Required	IRC server username.
MATTERBRIDGE_USER	Optional	Matterbridge bot username. If this environment variable is set, wheaties-brain-java will strip any [source] <nick> prefix from the message before "learning" it.

Running in development

You can use Docker Compose to run wheaties-brain-java in your development environment. First, copy .env.example to .env, and customize it to suit your needs.

cp .env.example .env

The BUILD_VERSION environment variable is used in Dockerfile to copy the correct wheaties-brain-java jar from build/libs into the resulting Docker image. If BUILD_VERSION is set to "1.0.0", for example, then Docker will try to copy build/libs/wheaties-brain-java-1.0.0.jar. See "Building" for instructions on how to build the requisite jar.

Finally, use docker-compose up to build the Docker image and start the container.

docker-compose up

Building

To build the project, run ./gradlew build. To build a standalone "fat" JAR that includes all dependencies, use ./gradlew shadowJar.

Docker images

Gradle tasks are included for easy Docker builds.

# Build a blolol/wheaties-brain-java:VERSION image
./gradlew docker

# Tag the blolol/wheaties-brain-java:VERSION image as blolol/wheaties-brain-java:latest
./gradlew dockerTagLatest

# Push both images to Docker Hub
./gradlew dockerPush
./gradlew dockerPushLatest

Releasing

To release a new version of wheaties-brain-java, change the version number in:

• The WheatiesMain.VERSION constant in WheatiesMain.java
• The version project attribute in build.gradle

Create a Git commit containing those two changes and a message like "wheaties-brain-java 1.0.0". Then, tag the commit with a name like v1.0.0.

Pushing a Git tag named v* (such as v1.0.0) triggers a GitHub Action that builds the Docker image, tags it as blolol/wheaties-brain-java:v1.0.0 and blolol/wheaties-brain-java:latest, and pushes it to blolol/wheaties-brain-java on Docker Hub.

License

In order to be compatible with PircBotX, wheaties-brain-java is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.